The road to Utopia is the road to Hell. — Communism and socialism are the opiates of the intelligentsia. — The left, in its eternal and futile quest for "equality", is more than willing to abolish liberty and sunder fraternity.

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Modern Liberalism as Wishful Thinking

TheFreedictionary.com defines wishful thinking as “the erroneous belief that one’s wishes are in accordance with reality.” There’s a lot of wishful thinking going on, and it’s harmful to liberty and prosperity. I’m referring to the wishful thinking that characterizes modern liberalism, which is more properly called left-statism verging on despotism.

The dysfunctional manifestations of left-statism are too many to enumerate, let alone to detail in a single post. Obamacare is merely a current dysfunctional manifestation. It has many predecessors and will have many successors, unless constitutional government can somehow be restored in the United States. Some of the manifestations take the form of laws, executive decrees, and judicial holdings. Others reflect “big ideas” that give rise to illogical and ill-founded laws, decrees, and holdings.

Without further ado …

REGULATION WORKS

I wrote an entire post about “Regulation as Wishful Thinking.” The underlying theme is that regulators (and those who support regulation) believe that they can fine-tune economic and social behavior to achieve optimal (or at least better) outcomes than the one produced by free markets. If one paragraph sums up the effects of regulation, it’s this one:

Regulation is counterproductive for several reasons. First, it curtails positive externalities [the satisfaction of consumers’ wants that is forgone due to regulatory restraints on market activity]…. The other reasons, on which I expand below, are that regulation cannot be contained to “good causes,” nor can it be tailored to do good without doing harm. These objections might be dismissed as trivial if regulatory overkill were rare and relatively costless, but it is pervasive, extremely costly its own right, and a major contributor to the economic devastation that has been wrought by the regulatory-welfare state.

Read the whole thing for the details of the argument and the evidence of the devastation. For a jarring example, see John Goodman, “FDA Regulations Kill,” John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog, February 18, 2014.

Wish: Regulation improves social and economic outcomes.

Reality: Regulation restricts the ability of people to pursue their lawful interests, and thereby harms them socially and economically.

Consider the intuitive and also well-documented relationship between taxes and economic activity. See, for example, Christina D. and David H. Romer, “The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks,” Working Paper 13264, National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2007; and William McBride, “What Is the Evidence on Taxes and Growth?,” Tax Foundation, December 18, 2012. One must bend over backward to concoct a theory which says that a rise in taxes will not reduce the rate of economic output or the growth of that rate. But such theories are propounded because their proponents favor higher taxes for two closely related reasons: more taxes enable more government spending, and more government spending usually means “social” spending. (One reason that “liberals” are against defense spending — or more of it — is that it absorbs money that could go into “social” programs.)

There are economists who support the minimum wage, not necessarily because of the economic soundness of the minimum wage, but because they just like the idea that (some) low-wage workers will make more because of it. Some of those economists have even produced studies which purport to show that a minimum wage has a “small” effect on the employment of low-wage workers. As if “small” were of no consequence to those who are unable to find and keep low-wage jobs because of the minimum wage. Well, the minimum wage — and its more overtly political twin, the “living wage” — do harm low-wage workers. And that’s that. See Linda Gorman, “Minimum Wages,” The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics at The Library of Economics and Liberty. For the latest, see James Pethokoukis, “CBO: The $10.10 Minimum Wage Would Cost 500,000 Jobs, With Most Benefits Going to Non-Poor,” AEIdeas, February 18, 2014.

Wish: Government can help low-skill workers by forcing employers to pay them more.

Reality: Minimum wages and “living wages” result in less employment among low-wage workers.

Bottom line: Those who are in most need of employment, and for whom the private sector would provide employment (other things being the same), are deprived of employment by well-meaning but economically wrong-headed minimum-wage and “living wage” laws.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT DOESN’T DETER MURDER

What about capital punishment? A paper from 1973, just a year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia effectively outlawed capital punishment, offers an exhaustive statistical analysis of the deterrent effect of capital punishment. See Isaac Ehrlich, “The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: A Question of Life and Death,” Working Paper No. 18, Center for Economic Analysis of Human Institutions, National Bureau of Economic Analysis, November 1973. The author’s conclusion:

[A]n additional execution per year over the period in question [1933-1969] may have resulted, on average, in 7 or 8 fewer murders.

Later:

Previous investigations … have developed evidence used to unequivocally deny the existence of any deterrent or preventive effects of capital punishment. This evidence stems by and large from what amounts to informal tests of the sign of the simple correlation between the legal status of the death penalty and the murder rate across states and over time in a few states. Studies performing these tests have not considered systematically the actual enforcement of the death penalty, which may be a far more important factor affecting offenders’ behavior than the legal status of the penalty. Moreover, these studies have generally ignored other parameters characterizing law enforcement activity against murder, such as the probabilities o± apprehension and conviction, which appear to be systematically related to the probability of punishment by execution.

Capital punishment is the capstone of a system of justice that used to work quite well in this country because it was certain and harsh. There must be a hierarchy of certain penalties for crime, and that hierarchy must culminate in the ultimate penalty if criminals and potential criminals are to believe that crime will be punished.

Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 (Gregg v. Georgia), with restrictions, capital punishment has become less swift and less sure than it had been. There were 1,359 executions in 1976-2013, an average of 36 a year, as against 4,863 in 1930-1972, an average of 113 a year. That is, the rate of executions has dropped by two-thirds from its pre-Furman rate. The drop in the execution rate notwithstanding, the deterrent effect of capital punishment remained strong, at least through 2000. See Hashem Dezhbaksh, Paul Robin, and Joanna Shepherd, “Does capital punishment have a deterrent effect? New evidence from post-moratorium panel data,” American Law and Economics Review 5(2): 344–376 (available in pdf format here. The authors argue that each execution deters eighteen murders, a number that reflects the larger population of the U.S. during the period covered by their analysis. It’s hard to read the two papers cited here and believe that capital punishment doesn’t deter homicide — unless you want to believe it.

Altogether, the more “humane” treatment of murderers since 1976 has cost 600 to 1,400 lives every year, or 23,000 to 53,000 lives in the past 38 years.

Wish: Capital-punishment is nothing more than murder by the state, and (non sequitur) it doesn’t deter murder, anyway.

Reality: Capital punishment is punishment, and when it is administered surely and swiftly it does deter murder.

Bottom line: Perhaps more than 50,000 murders would have been prevented if the rate of executions hadn’t been slowed drastically following the 1972-1976 moratorium on capital punishment.

MORE GUNS MEAN MORE CRIME

There’s a twisted consistency between opposition to capital punishment and support of stringent measures to control the availability of firearms. Both positions tip the scales in favor of predators and away from peaceful citizens.

To favor gun control is to engage in wishful thinking at its best (or worst). Why? Because to favor gun control is to favor the criminal over the law-abiding citizen. But according to wishful thinkers, stringent gun control would lead to a reduction violent crimes. As with the other kinds of wishful thinking addressed here, it just ain’t so.

John Lott‘s More Guns, Less Crime is the elephant in the room, and can’t be ignored. In that book, the article on which it’s based, and other books, Lott argues that allowing adults to own or carry guns leads to a significant reduction in crime. Lott’s work was controversial — some called it incendiary. Not surprisingly, many academics opened fire on it, picking and poking at Lott’s data and methods. I say not surprisingly because — in case it has escaped your attention — academics tend to be (wishful-thinking) leftists.

To save time and space, I fast-forward to a paper by Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser, “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?,” first published in Harvard’s Journal of Public Law and Policy (Vol. 30, No. 2, 2007, pp. 649-694). Here are some relevant excerpts:

There are now 40 states where qualified citizens can obtain such a handgun permit.28 As a result, the number of U.S. citizens allowed to carry concealed handguns in shopping malls, on the street, and in their cars has grown to 3.5 million men and women.29 Economists John Lott and David Mustard have suggested that these new laws contributed to the drop in homicide and violent crime rates. Based on 25 years of correlated statistics from all of the more than 3,000 American counties, Lott and Mustard conclude that adoption of these statutes has deterred criminals from confrontation crime and caused murder and violent crime to fall faster in states that adopted this policy than in states that did not.30 (op. cit., p. 658)

There are so many gems in the article that it is hard to stop quoting it. I should say “read the whole thing,” but I’ll succumb to temptation and quote a few choice passages here, and many more in the note at the bottom of this post (footnote numbers omitted for ease of reading):

[A study by Hans Toch and Alan J. Lizotte shows that] “data on firearms ownership by constabulary area in England,” like data from the United States, show “a negative correlation,” that is, “where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.” (p. 653)

A second misconception about the relationship between firearms and violence attributes Europe’s generally low homicide rates to stringent gun control. That attribution cannot be accurate since murder in Europe was at an all‐time low before the gun controls were introduced. (p. 653-4)

[T]wo recent studies are pertinent. In 2004, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released its evaluation from a review of 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some original empirical research. It failed to identify any gun control that had reduced violent crime, suicide, or gun accidents. The same conclusion was reached in 2003 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s review of then extant studies. (p. 654)

In the late 1990s, England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban of all handguns and many types of long guns. Hundreds of thousands of guns were confiscated from those owners law‐abiding enough to turn them in to authorities. Without suggesting this caused violence, the ban’s ineffectiveness was such that by the year 2000 violent crime had so increased that England and Wales had Europe’s highest violent crime rate, far surpassing even the United States. (p. 655)

[A]doption of state laws permitting millions of qualified citizens to carry guns has not resulted in more murder or violent crime in these states. Rather, adoption of these statutes has been followed by very significant reductions in murder and violence in these states. (p. 659)

[T]he determinants of murder and suicide are basic social, economic, and cultural factors, not the prevalence of some form of deadly mechanism. In this connection, recall that the American jurisdictions which have the highest violent crime rates are precisely those with the most stringent gun controls. (p. 663)

More than 100 million handguns are owned in the United States84 primarily for self‐defense, and 3.5 million people have permits to carry concealed handguns for protection. Recent analysis reveals “a great deal of self‐defensive use of firearms” in the United States, “in fact, more defensive gun uses [by victims] than crimes committed with firearms.” It is little wonder that the

National Institute of Justice surveys among prison inmates find that large percentages report that their fear that a victim might be armed deterred them from confrontation crimes. “[T]he felons most frightened ‘about confronting an armed victim’ were those from states with the greatest relative number of privately owned firearms.” Conversely, robbery
is highest in states that most restrict gun ownership.

Concomitantly, a series of studies by John Lott and his coauthor David Mustard conclude that the issuance of millions of permits to carry concealed handguns is associated with drastic declines in American homicide rates. (p. 671)

Per capita, African‐American murder rates are much higher than the murder rate for whites. If more guns equal more death, and fewer guns equal less, one might assume gun ownership is higher among African‐ Americans than among whites, but in fact African‐ American gun ownership is markedly lower than white gun ownership. (p. 676)

The reason fewer guns among ordinary African‐Americans does not lead to fewer murders is because that paucity does not translate to fewer guns for the aberrant minority who do murder. The correlation of very high murder rates with low gun ownership in African‐American communities simply does not bear out the notion that disarming the populace as a whole will disarm and prevent murder by potential murderers. (p. 678)

In sum, the data for the decades since the end of World War II also fails to bear out the more guns equal more death mantra. The per capita accumulated stock of guns has increased, yet there has been no correspondingly consistent increase in either total violence or gun violence. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that gun possession levels have little impact on violence rates. (p. 685)

Wish: Gun-control (or confiscation) will reduce violent crime.

Reality: More guns, no more crime. Crime is a product of underlying social and economic factors that vary from nation to nation, region to region, and socio-economic group to socio-economic group.

Bottom line: The desire to limit or eliminate private ownership of firearms reflects a distaste for weapons and an irrational reaction to relatively rare but horrific instances of gun violence. But the effect of limiting or eliminating private ownership is to disarm law-abiding citizens and encourage crime against them.

Since at least 1965, the false assertion that the United States has the industrialized world’s highest murder rate has been an artifact of politically motivated Soviet minimization designed to hide the true homicide rates. Since well before that date, the Soviet Union possessed extremely stringent gun controls that were effectuated by a police state apparatus providing stringent enforcement. So successful was that regime that few Russian civilians now have firearms and very few murders involve them. Yet, manifest success in keeping its people disarmed did not prevent the Soviet Union from having far and away the highest murder rate in the developed world.6 (pp. 650-1)

Luxembourg, where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany [with 30 guns per 100 persons] in 2002. (p. 652)

[D]espite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s. On the other hand, the same time period in the United Kingdom saw a constant and dramatic increase in violent crime to which England’s response was ever‐more drastic gun control including, eventually, banning and confiscating all handguns and many types of long guns. Nevertheless, criminal violence rampantly increased so that by 2000 England surpassed the United States to become one of the developed world’s most violence‐ridden nations. (p. 656)

[V]iolent crime, and homicide in particular, has plummeted in the United States over the past 15 years. The fall in the American crime rate is even more impressive when compared with the rest of the world. In 18 of the 25 countries surveyed by the British Home Office, violent crime increased during the 1990s. This contrast should induce thoughtful people to wonder what happened in those nations, and to question policies based on the notion that introducing increasingly more restrictive firearm ownership laws reduces violent crime. (p. 660)

The “more guns equal more death” mantra seems plausible only when viewed through the rubric that murders mostly involve ordinary people who kill because they have access to a firearm when they get angry. If this were true, murder might well increase where people have ready access to firearms, but the available data provides no such correlation. Nations and areas with more guns per capita do not have higher murder rates than those with fewer guns per capita. (pp. 665-6)

[R]educing gun ownership by the law‐abiding citizenry— the only ones who obey gun laws—does not reduce violence or murder. The result is that high crime nations that ban guns to reduce crime end up having both high crime and stringent gun laws, while it appears that low crime nations that do not significantly restrict guns continue to have low violence rates. (p. 672)

A recent study of all counties in the United States has again demonstrated the lack of relationship between the prevalence of firearms and homicide. (p. 686)

Comments & Correspondence

Now that this blog is in hiatus, I have closed comments on all posts. If you wish to communicate privately, you may e-mail me at the Germanic nickname for Friedrich followed by the last name of the great Austrian economist and Nobel laureate whose first name is Friedrich followed by the 3rd and 4th digits of his birth year followed by the usual typographic symbol followed by the domain and extension for Google’s e-mail service — all run together.

On Liberty and Libertarianism

What is liberty? It is peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior.

John Stuart Mill opined that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." But who determines whether an act is harmful or harmless? Acts deemed harmless by an individual are not harmless if they subvert the societal bonds of trust and self-restraint upon which liberty itself depends.

Which is not to say that all social regimes are regimes of liberty. Liberty requires voice -- the freedom to dissent -- and exit -- the freedom to choose one's neighbors and associates. Voice and exit depend, in turn, on the rule of law under a minimal state.

Liberty, because it is a social phenomenon and not an innate condition of humanity, must be won and preserved by an unflinching defense of a polity that fosters liberty through its norms, and the swift and certain administration of justice within that polity. The governments in and of the United States have long since ceased to foster liberty, but most Americans are captives in their own land and have no choice but to strive for the restoration of liberty, or something closer to it.

Who can restore liberty? Certainly not the self-proclaimed libertarians who are fixated on Mill's empty harm principle and align with the left on social norms. Traditional (i.e., Burkean) conservatism fosters the preservation and adherence of beneficial norms (e.g., the last six of the Ten Commandments). Thus, by necessity, the only true libertarianism is found in traditional conservatism. I am a traditional conservative, which makes me a libertarian -- a true one.

Notes about Usage

“State” (with a capital “S”) refers to one of the United States, and “States” refers to two or more of them. “State” and “States,” thus used, are proper nouns because they refer to a unique entity or entities: one or more of the United States, the union of which, under the terms and conditions stated in the Constitution, is the raison d’être for the nation. I reserve the uncapitalized word “state” for a government, or hierarchy of them, which exerts a monopoly of force within its boundaries.

Marriage, in the Western tradition, predates the state and legitimates the union of one man and one woman. As such, it is an institution that is vital to civil society and therefore to the enjoyment of liberty. The recognition of a more-or-less permanent homosexual pairing as a kind of marriage is both ill-advised and illegitimate. Such an arrangement is therefore a “marriage” (in quotation marks) or, more accurately, a homosexual cohabitation contract (HCC).

The words “liberal”, “progressive”, and their variants are usually enclosed in quotation marks (sneer quotes) because they refer to persons and movements whose statist policies are, in fact, destructive of liberty and progress. I sometimes italicize the words, just to reduce visual clutter.

I have reverted to the British style of punctuating in-line quotations, which I followed 40 years ago when I published a weekly newspaper. The British style is to enclose within quotation marks only (a) the punctuation that appears in quoted text or (b) the title of a work (e.g., a blog post) that is usually placed within quotation marks.

I have reverted because of the confusion and unsightliness caused by the American style. It calls for the placement of periods and commas within quotation marks, even if the periods and commas don’t occur in the quoted material or title. Also, if there is a question mark at the end of quoted material, it replaces the comma or period that might otherwise be placed there.

If I had continued to follow American style, I would have ended a sentence in a recent post with this:

What a hodge-podge. There’s no comma between the first two entries, and the sentence ends with an inappropriate question mark. With two titles ending in question marks, there was no way for me to avoid a series in which a comma is lacking. I could have avoided the sentence-ending question mark by recasting the list, but the items are listed chronologically, which is how they should be read.

This not only eliminates the hodge-podge, but is also more logical and accurate. All items are separated by commas, commas aren’t displaced by question marks, and the declarative sentence ends with a period instead of a question mark.